


There are many names in history

by wishonadarkstar



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Aftermath, Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Forgiveness, Gen, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-25 02:53:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14369346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishonadarkstar/pseuds/wishonadarkstar
Summary: Poe Dameron joined the Resistance because it was the right thing to do, and the responsibility falls heavy on his shoulders.Poe Dameron knows the right thing to do, no matter how much it hurts.





	There are many names in history

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookykingdomstarlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/gifts).



> This is meant as a companion fic to my other gift, [But none of them are ours](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14376900). I wrote this fic first, but they should be okay to read in either order.

Poe wasn’t sure who, exactly, he expected to emerge from the maw of the ship containing, per General Organa, “a very important defector”, but it wasn’t that black-clad figure that haunted his nightmares.

He froze. He shouldn’t have; he was an Admiral now. With the General still weak from her several minutes in vacuum, the Resistance was looking at him for their cues.

He couldn’t help that he still wasn’t cut out for the position he’d inherited.

The whispers moved through the crowd like a wash of condemnation — too many people had been hurt by the man in from of them to accept this, he thought. Him most of all.

He forced himself to attention, though. When Leia turned back from the quiet personal greeting she’d given Ren, Poe was ready to walk forward. He forced one foot in front of another, his breath coming in harsh pants that washed out the sounds of the rest of the hangar.

“Kylo Ren,” he heard himself say, and he thrust out his hand to shake the other man’s. He could feel the way the tension around them dissipated at that. Ren met his eyes, a flash of some unreadable emotion sparking for a brief moment, and then he nodded.

“Admiral,” he greeted, taking Poe’s hand. Poe stood there, mute, as the rest of the rag-tag brass the Resistance had mustered after their near defeat earlier that year filed forth to greet him too.

A defeat that Poe would like, desperately, to blame on the man in front of him.

Ren met his eyes again, and then he was talking to someone else, his voice quiet, his head ducked.

He knew he wasn’t welcome, it occurred to Poe.

Good.

~*~

There was a lot more to running a revolution than just going into battle, Poe had been learning quite thoroughly.

His holopad had some rather untenable figures on it. Poe tapped his stylus against his lips, trying to figure out how to make the equipment orders they absolutely needed work without resorting to begging.

He was almost certain it couldn’t be done, which was more the shame.

Leia had made him put together a uniform as a condition of his promotion, and when the figures were off this badly, sometimes she made him wear it.

He was just reflecting on how uncomfortable the collar of the uniform was against his neck when there was a knock at Poe’s door.

It gave him pause — no one knocked on his door. Everyone knew he was just as available to every member of the Resistance as the General. Many people took advantage of that; coming and going, telling him about morale issues and equipment failures, or bringing him snacks and gossip.

If all there was to being an admiral had been snacks and gossip, he probably would have demanded the gig ages ago, he thought.

“Come in,” Poe said, despite the fact that he knew he would regret it.

Kylo Ren peered around the door, and he looked wary, wary enough that Poe forced himself to gesture at the guest chair, smiling a grin he didn’t feel.

“Solo,” he greeted. The man flinched. Nothing he could do about that. There was simply no way Kylo Ren would ever join any Resistance Poe was a part of, so the man sitting in his office in the dust colored robes of a Jedi had to be Ben Solo.

It was the only way this meeting could go without Poe running away screaming, and so it was the way the meeting was going.

“Admiral Dameron,” Kylo Ren said, and Poe felt his breath catch in his chest. Have to work on that, he thought. Ren opened his mouth to say something else, and then he closed it, staring intently at Poe.

Poe was suddenly back in that room aboard the Finalizer, and he grabbed for a desk he couldn’t see, banging his pinkie against it, hard, and cursing as the pain didn’t even stop the wavery sensation of a flashback.

“Tell me where the map is,” Kylo Ren was saying, or maybe, “I can see now this was a mistake,” and was that someone on a commlink?

Poe blinked rapidly, and the flashback faded. He stretched out his hands carefully, just to prove he could, and looked back up at Ren who was in the doorway.

“My mother is on her way,” he said. Poe blinked at him, having forgotten for a few minutes that he was Leia’s son, that he would be able to comm her.

“I’m fine,” Poe said. He had to be, because Kylo Ren was walking freely around the base and coming into his office and he had to be fine.

“You’re clearly not,” Kylo Ren said, and the crease between his brows could have been concern or irritation, and Poe flinched before he thought about it.

He shouldn’t even — Ren had been wearing a mask.

“Poe?” Leia called. “Poe, are you alright?”

Kylo left as she entered, and suddenly he could breathe again.

He looked at Leia Organa, as opposite a presence from her son as was possible, and he shook his head. “I have to be, don’t I?” he said, instead of the ‘no’ he wanted to give her.

Leia pressed her lips together, as ever the woman he would follow into the heart of the sun if she asked it, and she shook her head. “I’ll tell him to leave you alone,” she said. “For what it’s worth, I think he meant to apologize. He’s been doing that.”

The laugh that tore out of Poe sounded half-hysterical, and Leia cocked her head at him slightly, leaning heavily against the back of the guest chair.

“Go on,” Poe said. “I’ve got to get these parts ordered, and you’ve got better things to do than babysit me.”

“Never,” she said with feeling, and he forced himself to grin at her.

“Always,” he rebutted, and finally she smiled back, and withdrew.

Once the door to his office was closed behind her, he dropped his head into his hands and started cursing at length.

It didn’t make him feel any better.

~*~

For the most part, Leia kept her promise. The most Poe heard from Kylo Ren were the intelligence reports that he signed off on and added commentary to, and those reports grew fewer and further between as they exhausted his information and as the First Order strategy changed without him involved.

The problem, though, was the Leia was getting weaker. Some brilliant spark of her had been fading since the disaster of their retreat from D’Qar. Poe found himself visiting her in her quarters where she would hold court in her dressing gown, propped up by pillows on the ratty sofa someone had found for her, her son coiled at her feet and holding her hand as if for dear life.

Poe resented him for that. He didn’t want to; didn’t want to begrudge a son time with his ailing mother. He knew what that felt like, and even after decades the loss of his own mother still reared up and bit him sharply at the worst times. But the sight of Kylo Ren with his fingers gingerly curled around his mother’s was enough to make the necessary briefings fraught, like he was dancing on a knife’s edge of anticipation.

He never had another flashback, though, not while Kylo was in the room at least. That hadn’t stopped the nightmares, but like anything else, time was doing its duty there.

It was getting to the point where he was more used to having Kylo in on his high level briefings than he was almost anyone else, and then Leia Organa died.

Poe hadn’t really — he hadn’t expected it, was the thing. Sure, she’d been sick, but a small part of him had been convinced that all it would take to make her better would be to win this war for her. To let her go back to what she had always been: a consummate politician.

But no, Leia Organa had been fading since her husband and brother and most of her friends had died in the course of a week. Poe had to be rational about this, had to accept that he should have known.

She’d been grooming him to replace her, after all. Making sure he bore the brunt of her shifted responsibilities as she’d gotten weaker, and he was…

He was an Admiral, the de facto leader of the Resistance, and he walked up to the front of the gathering around her funeral pyre, and delivered her eulogy.

She’d made him wear the damned uniform again, and he couldn’t even yell at her about it, and didn’t that just take the cake?

He hadn’t had any notes, and he’d never be able to tell you what he said, except that it must have been appropriate. He spent the rest of the funeral being hugged and passing from group to group like some sort of prize.

And maybe he was.

He finally found a quiet place, a dark hallway somewhere between the hangar and his quarters, and he slumped against the wall and let himself grieve.

Hours or minutes later, someone was there, and there was the solid clink of a heavy glass bottle being set somewhere to his left.

He looked up, ready to reassure whoever had set it down, and found himself face-to-face with Kylo Ren.

“You never think of me as Ben Solo,” the man said, and from the look on his face, that hadn’t been what he’d meant to say at all.

Poe shrugged. If it had been anyone else, he might have patted the floor next to him, invited the person to pull up some plascrete. It wasn’t, and he didn’t.

“I figure a guy who kills his own father doesn’t want to be called by his name,” Poe said. He didn’t add any of the confusing thoughts he had about Ren, about his inability to extricate the gawky, awkward man who loved his mother from the masked madman who’d tortured him.

Kylo Ren snorted, then sank down to the floor next to him.

“I brought… I brought a peace offering,” he said gingerly.

Poe thought of the intelligence that had meant that the Resistance had survived long enough to beg for new ships and recruit new bodies, and he nodded.

A bottle was pushed his way, and Poe startled.

“I plan on getting very drunk,” Ren said. “I think she’d have liked that. I think she’d like it more if you joined me.”

“You don’t get to manipulate me with her wishes,” Poe said, even though he was pretty sure Ren was right.

Kylo Ren shrugged. Poe could feel the gesture, a brush of a shoulder against his that should have made him flinch away. It mostly made him feel tired.

Poe took a long swig from the bottle and pretended that his eyes were watering from the burn of hard liquor.

Kylo took the bottle back and took his own drink, and then he sighed and leaned back.

“I didn’t want to come here, just so you know,” he said. “I — I was scared, and I commed my mother. I never expected the codes to still be good. But they were, and you know what she said?”

Poe shook his head, because he didn’t, and he wanted to protest that he didn’t want to know, because of course he didn't. It didn’t matter what Leia had told her son however many months ago when he’d been running scared.

But it did, because he still didn’t trust Kylo Ren and Leia had and now he had to be… he had to be someone he was not because Leia was dead.

“She told me ‘You come home, and then you keep going.’”

Poe bit back a response that wouldn’t have been particularly charitable. Apparently not well enough, because Kylo Ren laughed, short and bitter.

“It’s her home, at least. I don’t know if it will ever be mine, really, but it’s what I’ve got.”

There’s something then, between them, as Poe realizes that this could be it: if he sent Kylo Ren away, no one would question it. They’d exile him, and he’d never have to deal with the man again.

Rey was a Jedi too; they wouldn’t be without that resource, and they’d long since exhausted Ren’s knowledge of the internal workings of the First Order.

It felt strange, and Poe snatched the bottle again to drink away the sensation of role reversal.

This time, in this darkness, he held the power.

Kylo Ren took the bottle when he handed it back to him, and they passed the night of Leia’s death like that, in quiet exchanges of alcohol and a twist in their relationship.

He decided, somewhere around the middle of the bottle, that he’d decide whether to send Kylo Ren away in the morning.

It wasn’t the sort of decision Poe Dameron could justify making drunk.

~*~

He woke up hungover with alert sirens ringing and completely disoriented.

He slid down from where he was propped against a wall and felt someone prop him back up.

“Infirmary,” a deep, terrifying voice said, and then, “Wake up, Admiral.”

“Aw, hell,” Poe said, and he let… it felt wrong to call a man who he’d gotten blackout drunk with by the name of an evil that he’d left behind, but also, the man hadn’t denied hating hearing Solo, and…

“Ben,” the man supplied. “I mean, if you like. It’s the name my mother gave me, and...”

“I should be protesting how much you read my mind.”

Ben hauled him to his feet, and they both staggered.

“Why aren’t you?” Ben said, sounding genuinely curious.

“Something Rey said. She told me I had to work on my own shields, because I think extremely loudly, and then she said that, uh… that your Force strength lies primarily in the mind.”

“I can also stop blaster bolts,” Ben said, and then he froze. Poe punched him in the shoulder, with less force than he’d actually intended but that was probably for the best.

“Trust me, that one I knew.” The joke felt thin, but he thought being able to joke about such a thing was progress.

They managed to stumble into the infirmary and they weren’t the only ones in line to get the jab to relieve a hangover.

The side effects would be nasty in about 12 hours, but hopefully by then the danger would be past.

Ben jogged after him to the command center, and Poe leaned over the holotank, hands spread to balance and brace him, and stared at the alerts.

“We have spies,” Ben said softly. “I should have —”

“Okay people,” Poe said. “We need to focus on personnel evac. The equipment can be replaced or recovered. The people cannot. Where are we on plan scatter?”

“Computer picked out a destination three minutes ago. All pilots have been given a flimsy to be opened only once in flight,” Connix said calmly. She turned slightly and handed a flimsy to Ben. “Well, now they have.”

Poe nodded. “Okay, and we’ve sent out the signal to all deployed squadrons to meet at the secondary rendezvous.”

“Yes, sir,” Connix said. “We just need to get off the ground, now.”

Poe nodded. “Okay. Scramble the light fighters. We need to keep them away from the surface.”

He thought longingly of Black One, which he’d never been able to replace.

The burdens of command meant he couldn’t be risked going up alone like he’d like, and —

BB-8 whirred a query, and Ben stood behind him, tense and worried.

“Organa,” Poe said, and it felt right, even though everyone in the room jerked like he’d fired a weapon. “Take BB-8; get up there. See if you can hold them off.”

Ben hesitated, and then he was gone.

“Good to have our Jedi in light fighters anyway,” someone said, and Poe didn’t try to identify the speaker.

It was a long tradition of the Republic, after all.

~*~

Aboard the Nightstar, a light cruiser that Poe had nearly had to steal to acquire for use as a flagship, he kept it together long enough for them to go to hyper. When they came back through to realspace, he could feel the way everyone held their breath until it seemed certain they hadn’t been traced.

A loud cheer went up, and they plotted the second leg of their trip to the new base. Poe hoped he was the only one who realized that the fact that they’d been able to escape freely meant a different ship had been tagged.

There would be friends they wouldn’t see when they landed.

He couldn’t say anything though, because they needed to focus on getting to the new base, and then on setting it up and regrouping, and —

And figuring out how it was that the First Order would have known the Resistance would be vulnerable today, of all days.

<

~*~

The scattered remnants of their fleet took days to come in. Every hour brought a new arrival of a transport filled to the brim with personnel who were ready to commit murder from forced proximity, or a light fighter, or a medical ship or —

And Kylo Ren; Ben Organa, as Poe was making a point of referring to him as, grew later and later.

Poe wished he could admit that he was as worried about defection as the whispers across the base were, but Ben had had the flimsiplast with their coordinates on it. If he’d betrayed them, they’d already be dead.

No, as the rest of their fleet slowly was accounted for, he knew with a sick certainty what had happened.

Kylo Ren and Ben Organa would be too good a captive for the First Order. Poe had to hope that he’d been shot down instead of taken captive. No matter what he’d done to Poe, to the Resistance, no one deserved the sort of treatment the First Order gave its captives.

Poe had a datapad on his desk with all the information filled out to officially make Ben Organa a commander in the Resistance. One of them, because he’d died as one of them, at least, even if he hadn’t really meant to.

And Poe sort of thought he owed it to Leia to give her son that much: the history books would remember him as a hero, as a man who’d died defending a cause the day after his mother’s funeral. That was the sort of poetry he’d always known she deserved.

Leia had deserved a hell of a lot better than she’d got, and Poe grieved for that, grieved for her and the rest of the Resistance grieved with him.

He also grieved for BB-8. Privately, because even in the Resistance, droids weren’t seen by very many as thinking beings worth loving, but still, he grieved.

Poe wondered, in the dark when he was curled in his bunk and not sleeping because he couldn’t turn off his mind, whether there was any end to the things that the universe would take from him.

Force, without Leia, he didn’t even…

A proximity alert started clanging, and Poe managed to stamp into his boots before he took off at a run for the command center.

“Unknown vessel approaching.”

“Are they broadcasting any clearance codes?”

“Uh, yes sir, but the thing is…” The lieutenant trailed off and bit her lip. “They’re, well. It’s the General’s personal code. I don’t really know what —”

“It’s Ben,” Poe said with a certainty that he hadn’t know he could feel anymore, not since he’d been promoted to Admiral instead of court martialed. Not since earlier, maybe.

“It’s Commander Organa,” he clarified. “Can you get me a channel?”

“Sir,” the lieutenant said, her skepticism enough that it sounded sarcastic, but then there was the distinct crackle of an audio link.

Poe said, “Unknown vessel, this is Admiral Dameron of the Resistance. Identify yourself, over.”

“Dameron,” came that familier deep voice that Poe hardly ever had nightmares about anymore. “This is Ben Organa requesting permission to land.”

“Permission granted,” Poe said, and the room sucked in a tense breath as one.

Poe wished he had the luxury of being one of them, but. “Welcome home, Commander. Will we need medical standing by?”

“Please,” Ben said, his voice sounding rougher than even the audio channel could account for.

“See you dirtside,” Poe said, and he gestured at them to close the channel and turned on his heel to make it to the landing field.

<

~*~

The ship was beautiful, an upsilon-class shuttle that didn’t appear to have a single scratch on it. When the ramp lowered, Poe stood back with the medical staff and the two pathfinders who’d insisted on coming and waited.

Ben Organa stumbled out of the ship, pale and sick looking, wearing half an imperial uniform and clinging to the ship for support.

BB-8 followed him, and Poe shouted wordlessly and dropped to his knees, the bot careening into him as a solid weight that he had ached with missing. He was scuffed up badly and needed his paint touched up, but he was there and solid and perfec. He chirruped madly at Poe that Poe was alright, and had he had any difficulty, and Ben Organa was worse even than Poe about getting himself into scrapes. Poe laughed and wrapped himself around the droid.

Ben was still leaning against the ship, a medic waving a scanner over him. He caught Poe’s gaze.

“Sorry it took so long to get back, Admiral,” he said. “They had your droid.”

Poe forced himself to pull away from BB-8 so that their only contact was his hand on the curve of BB-8’s body.

“I appreciate it,” he said.

“Commander Organa,” the medic said. Poe had a moment to reflect that no matter their doubts, these people followed him, and that made him feel suddenly light-headed. BB-8 chirruped and nudged him. “You’ll need to come to the infirmary. We’ll have you good as new in a few hours.”

“I’ll debrief you then,” Poe said. “Feel better.”

“Of course,” Ben said, but he hesitated even as the medic attempted to guide him away. “Poe,” he said, and then gently pressed into his mind was a sensation of gratitude and homecoming. Poe would have staggered under the weight of it if he weren’t sitting down and braced against his droid.

Poe nodded, and then he grinned, and it might have been the best smile he’d ever managed for Kylo Ren who was definitely Ben Organa, and he said “Now we keep going.”

Ben laughed, a short bark of noise that made the medic glance askance at him.

“Now we keep going,” he agreed.

**Author's Note:**

> If you have not yet read my other gift, [But none of them are ours](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14376900), now is the time to do it, as the fics are meant to be read together.


End file.
